That said, I can criticize the Pirates for a lot, but the Pens have had the costume nights where people dress up as super heros. In the end it is entertainment and obviously these little dust collectors and theme nights work. There is nothing wrong with bobbleheads, fireworks or superhero dress up nights in and of themselves. Teams in all sports use them to ensure full stadiums on tougher games against less attractive opponents or midweek games.

The only reason that I posted is that it is a running decades long meme for the Pirates. Implying the old Nero meme which has lasted Millennium of Bread and Circuses. It made this I am sure a small chuckle to see even for those who love the Pirates.

To be honest, signing Machado and going dirt cheap with the rest of your roster makes a ton of sense for the Pirates and I don't know why they haven't considered it. You get the big name player to get fans in, and he's a player that will most likely be able to individually make your team competent. You don't need to spend too much money, just keep rotating through cheap players in their Pre-Arb years and maybe sign a great player in their arbitration years here and there. You just can't sign guys like Cervelli and Dickerson and have to replace them with guys like Stalling and Luplow.

“The Pirates just traded a bunch of young players for Chris Archer and projected to be .500 in a division that suddenly looks attainable. Yes, the Cubs and Cardinals are projected to be six games better than the Bucs. But Chicago and St. Louis are both over their payrolls from last year, as well as their three-year averages. If the Pirates would be willing to go back to their three-year average, they could have as much as $30 million to spend.
If the Pirates spent that $30 million on, say, getting Manny Machado, they could jump right into the fray at the top of their division.
That’s the essence of a mystery team — a decent team, with money to spend, and a hole that could be filled by one of the best two free agents on the market, one of the youngest free agent superstars in years.
The Pirates could spend. They shouldspend. But will they?”

This might be a little bit too sloppy, but I think the idea of Machado makes sense basically as the extreme end of the genre of move that the Pirates should make. That genre is something like "going for broke between now and 2021." It could include signing Machado, making a trade for somebody like Segura (although, he didn't really go for that much, but that's besides the point), or making a big investment in someone like Grandal.

The reasoning is pretty straightforward to me: even in a world where Keller and Hayes both become star contributors, some kind of retooling or rebuilding will need to happen around that time, and there simply isn't enough talent in the upper minors to quickly assemble a contender with some supplementary players. Right now we have a reasonably deep cast of good MLB supplementary players and a handful of guys who either are decisively more than that or border on being decisively more than that. The only coherent plan is to do whatever it takes to get another impactful player and hope for the best with guys like Bell and Archer.

I also really don't think Machado would come here under any circumstance. Bracketing the obvious that Nutting would never do it, maybe one way to go about it would be to give him the huge AAV along with something like opt-outs after the second and third years. As long as he doesn't have a full NTC or something, it will be possible to move him when the window has closed or other guys become more expensive and decisions have to be made, and he has the possibility to take a short-term payday and still attract a mega-contract in his prime. He's 26 years old. There's almost no downside either way, but it would be the most shocking baseball signing in recent memory. I'd be shocked even to see vague bull**** rumors that we have checked in with him.

The market still does seem kinda weird for both Harper and Machado. Obviously Harper makes no sense here, but a weirdly not-as-competitive market for a 26 year old superstar would certainly be a better weakness to exploit than hoping ground balls can get us 10 more wins.

“The Pirates just traded a bunch of young players for Chris Archer and projected to be .500 in a division that suddenly looks attainable. Yes, the Cubs and Cardinals are projected to be six games better than the Bucs. But Chicago and St. Louis are both over their payrolls from last year, as well as their three-year averages. If the Pirates would be willing to go back to their three-year average, they could have as much as $30 million to spend.
If the Pirates spent that $30 million on, say, getting Manny Machado, they could jump right into the fray at the top of their division.
That’s the essence of a mystery team — a decent team, with money to spend, and a hole that could be filled by one of the best two free agents on the market, one of the youngest free agent superstars in years.
The Pirates could spend. They shouldspend. But will they?”

^That’s the Pirates related content.

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In a vacuum, you'd expect this every year on account of inflation being a thing. Lower-revenue teams obviously need a build-up/tear-down cycle to get World Series opportunities, but CHI isn't in that group and the Cards appear to be in the build-up phase winning 88 games last year.

I was just thinking that the most annoying outcome of all might be Machado caving and signing for something like 225 mil that has some serious front-loading (like 35, 30, fill in the rest for however many years) and an opt-out or two. He seems beyond even the possibility of the Pirates being speculatively linked (correct me if I'm wrong, but off the top of my head the mega players we've been linked to before have always been via the trade route), so I'd just as soon see this be over. He and Harper are big enough to be holding up a lot of the remaining markets, since it's essentially a matter of what 4 or 5 teams are going to do concerning 3 or 4 players, with the White Sox tossed in for good measure.

It all makes sense from the Pirates point of view, but why would Machado want to sign with the Pirates? They are still thought of as a losing franchise, they won't offer him more money than someone else, and I love the city, but let's face it. Pittsburgh doesn't have the greatest history of attracting free agents in any of the sports. Sure, how the franchises are run is part of that, but I'd guess there is more to it.

The pirates were living on luck with reclamation projects for their big upswing. They didn't really even have bad luck the past couple years, it's just reverting back to the norm. You can't expect a lot of the guys the pirates sign to actually work out and be above average WAR players.

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The biggest thing they haven't replaced IMO is that big bat in the middle of the order. Cutch wasn't Harper or Trout, but he was still a .900+ OPS guy. It sucks because unless someone comes out of nowhere, I don't see how they are going to find that guy again any time soon either.

I used to go to a bunch of those games. Granted I was in grade school or middle school, but those were really the dark days of Pirates baseball. Other than when PNC was first built, there wasn't much of a reason to go to the games. I would go to a handful of games a year, so might as well pick ones where you get a cool giveaway. That's how I looked at it anyway.

I still have the Maz, Clemente, and Stargell ones. They aren't too bad. Then they went real cheap/corny with them or they were picking guys that weren't even their 'good' players. I remember I had a Pokey Reese, Ryan Doumit, Zach Duke, etc.

He'd certainly be preferable to the interesting-but-still-reclamation-types we have been linked to. The Giants have no reason to hold onto him, although he's someone who could plausible fetch just as much at the deadline when teams are even more desperate to assemble their postseason bullpens.

And I'm not sure how it would work logistically, but if we really wanted to be aggressive with bullpenning and deploying an opener, we could then move to sign Sergio Romo, and assuming things hold, we'd have an absolutely outstanding set of bullpen arms. These are just some spitball thoughts, but it's really this lack of aggression that annoys me the most about being a Pirates fan. Obviously we should be in on a HOF talent who matches our most gaping need and wouldn't tilt the payroll over a previous commitment, but at the very most this would cost us a couple of ok prospects and 8 million or so total in salary, and it comes built in with the contingency plan of being able to make further deadline trades if things haven't worked out.

I think it's right to focus on our basic inadequacies, which are very glaringly centered around the offense and its lack of power. We also need starting pitching depth, but that's really just a truism that can never not be true for an MLB team. Above both these things, though, I think we need to pursue a strategy and an identity. If we want to take the 82-win team core and see if we can boost it to the playoffs by taking what the Rays did and giving a different spin on it, then I can live with that. But after a promising start to the offseason in making the decision to move beyond Luplow, Moroff for an interesting depth piece in Gonzalez, things have stalled, and it seems more like we're waiting for the market to shake out before making any other moves. On January 9th the offseason is still quite young, but we still need some concerted and specific moves. Even if Harris / Romo wouldn't be the targets, find a reliever whose strengths might pair with what you see as Archer or Musgrove's weaknesses or something (if we're going to fully lean into the bullpenning strategy).